[caption id="attachment_5996" align="aligncenter" width="506"] Tegwen visits Tycroes County Primary School[/caption]

The FUW dairy cow Tegwen – Welsh for “fair” and “white” – painted in the colours of the Welsh flag and known to highlight the FUW campaign to achieve a fair farmgate price for milk, has been to visit school children in Carmarthenshire to bring a bit of the countryside to the classroom.

Visiting the reception class at Tycroes County Primary School, Tycroes, Ammanford, ‘Tegwen’ this time round helped to showcase where dairy products come from.

Tycroes County Primary School teacher Valerie Davies was eager to follow a visit to Folly Farm up with an interactive lesson on dairy cows and their products and the FUW was delighted to accept the invitation.

FUW’s marketing and membership manager Caryl Roberts facilitated an interactive lesson, with educational material sourced from education resource website ‘Countryside Classroom’ and FACE Cymru (Farming and Countryside Education), to the reception class about milk and dairy farming as well as bringing Tegwen to help and brought samples of local cheddar and three types of milk to taste.

[caption id="attachment_5994" align="aligncenter" width="237"] FUW marketing and membership manager Caryl Roberts brought samples of local cheddar for the children at Tycroes County Primary School[/caption]

Caryl Roberts said: “It’s essential for children to learn very early on about where their food comes from.

“Not only does it broaden their understanding of the origin of food and drink but also gives them an insight into their rural community.

“Resources from Countryside Classroom and FACE Cymru made it easy for me to prepare a suitable lesson for the children. It also helps to take samples of locally produced cheddar as a reward for listening so intently.”

The FUW has a long standing commitment to helping children learn about food, farming and the natural environment and is keen to further help in bringing the countryside into the classroom of schools across Wales.

Free educational materials can be found on the Countryside Classroom website http://countrysideclassroom.org.uk/ and bilingual material is available from the FACE Cymru website http://www.face-cymru.org.uk/.

The materials are categorised by key stage or age with a variety of different formats such as games, activities, quiz’s and presentations.

The Farmers’ Union of Wales is reminding and encouraging members to make use of funding offered by Farming Connect (FC) as part of their Lifelong Learning and Development Programme.

The aim of the programme is to deliver a more professional farming and forestry industry, which will be delivered through a combination of direct training and on line e-learning.

Categories for training are split into three areas - transformational, consisting of business and leadership and management courses; technical, consisting of key technical training courses and machinery and equipment use.

The union’s land use and parliamentary committee chairman Gavin Williams said: “I would encourage all eligible members to participate in the Lifelong Learning and Development Programme offered by Farming Connect.

“There is a strong call for the farming industry to be more professional and through these training courses we can help ourselves to become more efficient, perceptive and resilient.”

Those interested in applying for funding need to be registered with FC and complete the online personal development plan before they can submit a funding application for completing a short course.

Eligible candidates can submit an application for funding, which could cover up to 80 percent of the cost, between January 4 to January 29, April 1 to April 29 and June 1 to June 30 in 2016.

Those applying for funding for a machinery and equipment use course need to complete the online Health and Safety (H&S) course before submitting an application.

Applicants are further advised to speak to their local approved training provider about course dates and obtain course costs and will be notified if funding has been approved or not.

Eligible clients are advised that they must receive funding approval in writing before commencing training, must pay the training provider the minimum 20 percent contribution and complete training within 9 months once funding has been approved.

The Farmers’ Union of Wales is urging the Welsh Government to look beyond the current CAP and undertake work early on to identify priorities and options which best suit Wales’ agricultural industry.

The FUW stresses that early discussions are essential in order to feed into discussions at an EU level and help shape the next CAP.

In light of this the union believes that concerns over whether the UK will remain a part of the EU should not be used to justify procrastination, not least since such work may also inform policies should exit from the EU become inevitable.

Reiterating a key message from the FUW manifesto, FUW president Glyn Roberts said: “Over the past five years both the European Commission and the Welsh Government have, it is hoped, learned important lessons in terms of planning for the future.”

The European Commission (EC) failed to secure agreement for its proposed reforms in time to implement the scheme in 2014, while the complexity of the regulations finally passed meant the new Commissioner – Phil Hogan – had little choice but to make CAP simplification an immediate priority.

Despite the twelve month delay to the CAP implementation date, the Welsh Government’s failure to heed the FUW’s warnings by preparing for the new CAP early on led to two legal challenges and limited options in terms of the final payment models which could be practically implemented in Wales.

“As such, we are left with an imperfect Welsh Basic Payment Scheme which fails to meet the key aspirations agreed by government and industry, and costly levels of bureaucracy which contradict the original principles agreed by the European Commission and Parliament,” added Glyn Roberts.

The clear lesson for the EC is that, in light of co-decision making, it is essential that discussions on the priorities and options available under the next CAP must be started early – a concern already raised by the FUW with Commissioner Hogan.

A key message in the FUW’s 2016 Welsh Assembly election manifesto, which should be heeded, are the strong believes that the incoming Welsh Government should undertake detailed work to examine the possible outcomes of adopting a broad range of Welsh basic payment models post 2020, undertake mapping work in order to identify those areas which might be used as the basis for future payment models and investigate the benefits or otherwise of multi-tiered payment systems akin to the Redistributive and Tir Mynydd models in order to feed in to discussions at an EU level.

The Farmers’ Union of Wales has welcomed a Welsh Government decision to accept its calls for a ‘simplified’ stage 1 appeals process for alleged over-declarations on this year’s Single Application Form.

Following the release of Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) part payments from December 1, and the issuing of accompanying payment statements, many farmers had noticed large deductions had been made to their eligible areas, in some cases triggering penalties.

“In many cases these seem to make no sense, and the fact that maps showing how government staff have mapped areas are not available, makes appealing very difficult,” said FUW Gwent county executive officer Glyn Davies.

“We have therefore been in constant talks with Rural Payments Wales (RPW) to simplify the appeals process, and welcome the proposals – although we remain frustrated that we are in this situation,” he added.

Under the simplified appeals system those who wish to appeal against deductions can submit CRNs and the relevant field numbers via RPW Online, along with contact details, at which point Welsh Government officials will check their maps. If queries are not acknowledged by RPW within seven days farmers should contact the Welsh Government’s Customer Contact Centre.

“If Welsh Government only partially accepts or rejects the appeal, farmers will be given confirmation of the area deducted and a screen shot of Welsh Government mapping to show where deductions have been made. There will then be a second opportunity to query the figures before moving to a stage 2 appeal,” added Glyn Davies.

“Farmers are suffering financially this year due to poor farmgate prices, so it is extremely frustrating to be confronted with reductions or penalties without any clear information about why these may have been applied.

“The complexity of the new CAP rules and the requirement to provide sketch maps has been a nightmare for farmers and all those assisting them this year.

“FUW staff worked tirelessly in the run up to May 15, dealing with the new regulations, so I have every sympathy with Welsh Government staff who are now under the same pressures.

“However, it is extremely frustrating to see cases where farmers’ figures have been changed by miniscule amounts and these add up to large areas, despite mapping measurements being by definition extremely subjective.”